Call Center

It has been a wild week here in Lisbon at Dialogic Connections and there is so much going through my head. Will the new Dialogic be anything like the old one? Can it generate more interest in telecom? Will more companies be drawn to this market via the company's partner program?

Perhaps the most important takeaway from the Dialogic Connections event taking place this week in Lisbon, Portugal is that Nick Jensen the President and CEO of Dialogic has a strong vision for where the company is headed. Nick states emphatically that he hates to lose and says his partners need to share this feeling. I got to meet him last night at the first company event since Eicon Networks purchased Intel's media processing assets and formed the new Dialogic.

Nick spent some time talking about industry growth around the world and the most noteworthy is the fact that Asia/Pacific is growing quite rapidly and not just in percentages but in dollars. You need to take this market seriously as they are great partners and formidable competitors he stated.

There was truly a tremendous amount of activity at the show and as Jon Arnold mentioned earlier, one person couldn’t do justice to it all. Still, great job Mark. Thanks for the coverage.

Here is an excerpt:

Quintuple play?
We’ve all heard of double and triple plays in baseball, but now a VoIP organization is pitching ways to better manage and bill for the quintuple play of IP-based services, including broadband, mobile, VoIP, IPTV, and Emerging Content. The Internet Protocol Detail Record Organization (IPDR) is a consortium of service providers, software and equipment manufactures, system integrators, and billing vendors that are collaborating to facilitate the exchange of usage and control data between networking and hosting elements.

A sign of a healthy market is one in which there is lots of money being made. IDC reports that the VoIP services market will be growing at a phenomenal rate. I was blown away to discover they predict VoIP equipment support services spending will reach $1.27 billion in 2010. this is a staggering number and one can imagine how much money will be spent on service and equipment based on the fact so much is being spent on the support services.

As you can imagine Conference this morning and gave a riveting speech about how the call center of the future will be much more automated and flexible.As you can imagine, he touched on multi-tenancy (a core differentiator of Telephony@Work products) and went on to say that multi-tenancy is not only useful for service providers but also for many large customers who can take advantage of multi-tenancy to share infrastructure across sites and business units without sacrificing local autonomy and control over each group’s business processes.

Call Center 2.0 was the theme of this keynote, with a focus on tight integration with Oracle’s CRM offerings, unification of the disciplines of Customer Relationship Management and Customer Interaction Management, multi-tenancy and its benefits for corporate hosting (to service diverse internal business units on common infrastructure) and commercial hosting of IP contact center technology (through carrier-partners and Oracle itself), as well as the differentiated ability to adapt and change IP Contact Center ACD business processes in real-time via human inputs into Oracle’s unified Administration Manager tool (for their multi-channel ACD offerings). The goal of such adaptability is to achieve ongoing technology lifecycle renewal, increase efficiency and maximize customer satisfaction. Eli also alluded to the fact that real-time automated business process optimization is “call center 3.0” and that much of that is possible at Oracle today via Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite, including its acquisition of Sigma Dynamics (a real-time analytics company that can enable real-time automated business process optimization for call centers on a custom basis based on a customized set of performance goals). Eli’s vision is that such technology will ultimately be packaged as a ‘productized’ and pre-integrated solution to empower ‘mass market’ mainstream call centers to get the most out of their Oracle ACD and CRM investments.

The point is we will soon see an increasing ability to automate call center optimization, with metrics that are driven by performance goals and the ability to make real-time adjustments to technology-driven business processes.

If you have any doubt about the future of open source communications consider it shattered as Amazon.com will soon be deploying 5,000 phones connected to the Pingtel ECS platform running on Linux. The relationship between Pingtel and Amazon.com started about a year ago with an initial deployment of Pingtel’s SIPxchange Enterprise Communications Solution (ECS) at Amazon’s headquarter in Seattle. This deployment replaced a legacy PBX system.

The question is why would Amazon switch out their existing PBX and the answer is the leading e-commerce site already runs about 20,000 Red Hat Linux servers so they are what you might say is comfortable with Linux to begin with. This install will add 3 more Linux servers to the mix.

As you might imagine as voice is mission-critical to Amazon they are running these Pingtel PBXs in a redundant manner with failover built in.

I can't help but feel like a proud parent as we get ready for this week's ITEXPO. The team I work with have absolutely outdone themselves and the scope of this event is beyond my imagination. To think this show started in 1999 at the Hotel Del Coronado a stones throw from the San Diego Convention Center -- it's current home.

As you get ready to come to ITEXPO this week there is one request I would like to make of you and that is this event has more content than any previous event in TMC history and it certainly has as much education as any event I have ever been to. The goal of this blog entry is not to brag but to ensure you are spending enough time in the sessions in the conference rooms and/or on the show floor.

My request is that you plan to have enough time to absorb everything -- the exhibits -- there are more exhibits at this show than ever before -- and all the sessions.

Here is a pre-show write-up on ITEXPO I just saw on New Telephony. Good stuff. In a pre-show meeting yesterday I was just blown away at how much content there is at this show. Certainly if you have been following the ITEXPO topic page of my blog you are keeping up with much of the activity.